Well the most obvious answer to your question is that the basic method of putting film together is by mechanical cut & splice. This was the only method until quite recently, say about the late 80s. During the 90s the speed of NLE converted many film editors to that way of working, so film would be scanned onto optical disks for editing and then the editing log would be used by the negative cutter to conform the neg (yes, by cutting and splicing). Colour grading etc were all done in the film lab. Only recently has sufficient computing power been available to do more of the post production in digital (Silicon Graphics etc) and now the capabilities for computer generated special effects has given us the fashion of plotless movies full of effects.
So that describes something of the processes of film cutting.

Film (and video) editing is something on a much higher plane. Nobody won an Oscar for cutting; it's the editing that makes the movie. I always say (and I'm sure there are many here that will say I'm wrong) that the movie is made in the editing suite -- in this I include much that we do here under "post production".
There are a number of books that take you through editing and if you're really interested then the book "Selected Takes - Film Editors On Editing" by Vincent LoBrutto (Praeger) makes great reading. It has chapters by 21 leading film editors. And of course one of the standard texts is "The Technique of Film Editing" by Karel Reisz (Focal Press). The mechanical processes of assembly don't matter (scissors, film cement, splicing tape, or computer) it's the intellectual processes that get you the Oscar.

EDIT: John is correct. Video Assist is uniformly employed to let the director actually see what the camera is seeing.Previously the only person who actually saw the shot, before screening the rushes, was the camera operator. Video assist takes an image feed from the optical viewfinder (yes, through the lens viewing -- wonderful tech) and only recently has the quality of that been good enough for rough assemble cutting.

"Selected Takes" also gives you an insight to the mechanical issues and physical work of editing large volumes of film, such as those involved in the Cinerama (3 projector setup) production "How the West Was Won" and editing 65mm film for "Lawrence of Arabia". And it was easy (as I well remember) to have film trailing around the floor and in danger of damage (of course it was only a work print). One quotation I love, but can't find, is by an editor who said that if his wheeled chair cut the film he'd let it be: "that chair was a better cutter than I ever was".

In the last 12 months especially, DI (Digital Intermediate) has become quite popular, thanks to high quality film scanners that work at 2K (which is 2048x1556 resolution when scanning full 35mm frames, but normally projected at 2048x1080), and recently even 4K.

Obviously the rest of the workflow needs to keep up with these large frames, but the idea is to shoot on film because the DP likes the look (chemistry, much larger frame than 2/3" HD which facilitates small DOF, etc.) and/or wants to use an optical reflex viewfinder, but still be able to avoid all the expense of blade cutting a lot of film, because with DI all work after shooting is done with computers.

Currently, since few theaters have digital projection, the end result feeds a film recorder to make a special film print for making distribution prints.

I used to cut film - and that really meant cutting the film. Used an upright and flatbed. For audio I used the good old gang sync and rolled by hand. Rubbed down tracks with acetone for fades and bumps and the like. Used sync pops at the head and tail if needed. Cut everyhting in reels, and mixed that way as well.

I have posted the workflow before but short version is that thanks to the video workprint and matchbacks we old timers can cut on video and/or on computers. For a while it was a bit hard ot keep up with what was going on. We would shoot in 35mm and transfer to 3/4 and VHS with a TC window and cut VHS to VHS work prints. Than we went to a D/Vision system and had the same process except we would injest TC as well so we could dump out an EDL and give to the negative cutter who had developed this new process called "matchback" - which we went into suspect because the idea of being able to take an EDL and somehow magicly have it conform to film edge numbers for a new cut baffled us. Along the way we would have stuff done to D1 and do an offline edit and than come back for an online edit. Same went for 1 inch before that. Telecine was done mostly as the end, now it is done at the start but it has not been until recently you could shoot at 24 fps and keep that workflow in the digital world at the price point almost any of us can do now....at home.

Most recently we have the DI so the process is sort of repeating itself but backwards. I have to say cutting film is sort of like sex - you can move forward and enjoy all sorts of new things but sometimes you really want to just go back to the real basics. And I really really miss the feel of film, the stringing up of the reels of mag in the mix, the cutting block and the grease pencils. Watching workprints that have marks on them, black and white slugs of effects and low con prints for audio work. Ohhh and the excitment of sitting in the mix and tossing some effects into the ultra stereo surround mix. I get goose bumps all over.

They have been converting dailies to video and then to digital routinely for probably a decade and a half by now. Before that they edited on a flatbed editor made by KEM or Steenbeck which were once as synomynous with editing as AVID is today. Some folks who are comfortable using the old flatbeds kept doing it that way, but I would guess most if not all have converted to digital NLEs by now. I'm surprised to see Steenbeck is still in business, they do not appear to have a US disributor, but they have several in Europe and Asia. I can't find a webpage for KEM.

Editing on film is called workprint editing, you print your dailies on film and actually edit that film. The workprint gets kind of beat up during the editing process, so when they are done, they cut the negative for the "answer print" This print is then examined for any necessary chagnes before the "release print."
Here is some info on workprints from a NYC lab. Film dailies are probably used more often these days by cinematographers than by editors, to check for lighting and focus issues and to work on "color timing" the final print.

Most films are edited using video dailies. When the cut is final, they use and EDL, an edit decision list, which matches video timecode to the edge numbers on the film and do "video to film matchback." When the final edit is locked the they actual cut the film negative to make the final prints.

Also remember that when you should film, you are using a two system process. Film cameras do not capture audio on the film, like video cameras do. So when you send your film to a lab, they sync the audio to it, then they usually do a telecine process to convert the film to video.

This article from KODAK diagrams the process.

Here's Technicolor's Encylopedia of film terms.

Here's a negative cutter talking about the difference between digital and workprint workflows.

>> I really really miss the feel of film

Yes indeed, filmy, that magic is real but darned hard to explain to people who've known only video and NLE. Darned hard to explain to myself, now I'm trying! Partly it was about craft, a closeness to the material. Cutting decisions were made with much greater care and the slowness of the mechanics allowed time for the subconscious to consider all options for best outcome.
Of course this has nothing to do with the "film look" that promted the thread. Film look is about the real magic of Film Stock Characteristics (boy, you must all be tired me saying this. Maybe in future I'll save a lot of tedium and just write FSC to all who trigger the "film look" response).

I think I've said this before but I'm 99% certain the 'magic' of cutting film was the smell, to misquote a famous line "I just love the smell of bromine in the morning".

Although it's been nearly 30 years since I cut film I still find it hard to convince my brain that cuts in an NLE are non destructive, maybe it's that damn scissor icon that some NLEs still use :)

Still if you think film was hard and needed a lot of care at least it was only a work print. Imagine cutting 2" video tape, bear in mind that back in the days of early analogue video systems the generational loss was huge. The ones in the film business who never get enough praise in my opinion are the neg cutters.

Bob.

Okay, so you have a film project that you want to edit in Vegas: what would you set the project properties to? As NTSC has a limited colour range, I'm assuming you wouldn't use that as any colour correction done in the NLE will not correspond to the far superior capabilities of film?

Which just leaves the HD settings?

Also, as an EDL doesn't produce any information other than cut information, how do you produce a final master with all the colour corrections, titles etc. made in the NLE?

You're right, the best you can hope for is a cuts only EDL.
Which is still pretty useful considering that most film editing is 99% cuts anyway.
Thing is the transfer to video isn't even going to preserve much of the data present in the film neg so even attempting CC would be pointless anyway plus as I understand film timing is specified in a totally different way to video.


Bob.

Let's get this right. You do principle photography on film. Presumably this is done for quality and you wish to see this on the screen. You can go two ways: 1) high resolution scan of the film and do your post production in a high end NLE system; 2) low resolution scan for straight NLE cutting. The first requires considerably more than 8 bits luminance in 4:4:4 and the second needs rigid timecode matching to source edge numbering. You edit and hand the EDL to the negative cutter who conforms the neg to your edit. All colour corrections are done at the printing stage. If you have optical effects (titles, fades etc) they will be done on 2K machines (unless you've shot on 35mm) and put out to film for cutting into the negative for printing. Expect various intermediate stages involving intermediate negs and answer prints.
Vegas doesn't meet the requirements.

Serena:
>Vegas doesn't meet the requirements.

So, you can't cut a 16/35mm film in Vegas then? Or you can do basic cuts, but that's it?

Theoretically you could do it. If you telecine the film with the timecode burned into the picture, you could manually generate your own EDL or cut list.

But if you're going back to film, you probably have the money for a system that handles it better.

2- If your final output is video, then of course you can shoot on film, telecine to video, and output to video.
Double system sound (recording sound seperately, and ideally automating the sync process) might be inconvenient though... I don't know much about that.

I am going to date myself but I remember something called a Moviola that was used for movie editing.

Ed B

>Theoretically you could do it. If you telecine the film with the timecode burned into the picture, you could manually generate your own EDL or cut list.

Well, Vegas can produce an EDL, so I guess it is conceivable to use Vegas.

>>>Well, Vegas can produce an EDL, so I guess it is conceivable to use Vegas.<<<

We have had many many discussions over the years on how Vegas does (Does not) do EDL's. (here is one such topic from 2004 - EDL For Neg Cut) For film to video and back to film Vegas is *not* the tool you want to use, even Sony (SoFo) has stated this when the tiopic has come up.

Things are a bit more complicated than simply handing over an EDL. In the traditional film making world when you shoot film a negative cutter logs the negative and the films edge numbers are logged and when the workprint is handed over the negative cutter conforms the negative to the workprint. Now the trick was, and still is, how to do a telecine of the camera negative (And any other elemtents) with timecode and be able to edit those video dailies *and* how you get this back to a neg cutter. The process normally is:

1> Shoot the film.
2> have the negative processed
3> Have the dailies transfered over to whatever format you ask for. At this stage you also need to do this based on your neg cutters specs. Do they want drop frame or non-drop frame timecode? Where do they want the window burn placed? Where do they want the edge number window placed? And so on.
4> Edit offline on video or dump the material to a NLE that will provide you with, at the least, an EDL that will be useable by the negative cutter. At the most edit on a system that will also provide matchback. You should also be cutting in reels - meaning a reel is about 10 minutes long. You need to also allow for things like head and tail leaders and some waste in the answer print stage. There is logic to why so many films hover at about 90 minutes long.
5> Dump out your EDL and/or matchback list and hand it over, along with rough output of the locked cut, to your negative cutter.

At no time here does an editor worry about things like color correction. Remember the negative cutter is only cutting the raw negative. The color timing will come later by sitting in the film lab and watching the reels and makingnotes with the timer. Further timing will be done when tghe film ios transfered over to Video. There is a color shift from Video to Film. In others words what you see in a theatre is not what you would see sitting at home on TV color wise.

Things like dissolves and the like are handled a bit different. A negative cutter must be aware because at thes epoints they have to go into an A/B cut. If you do any sort of multi layered effect you should be looking at an optical house, not the negative cutter. By the time a negative cutter gets to it they should have any sort of effect shots already in a seperate negative. There elemtns would also need to have been telecined and cut into the final verison so the EDL and matchback reflected these new elements.

Audio is another whole deal. The audio editor (and anyone in the post audio department) is going to be cutting from the locked reels. The audio will have to be done to the specs of the audio house that will be doing the transfers to mag. Now at this point I am just guesisng you have done the full final mix in vegas so what you are dumping out is it.. *HOWEVER* real world is not that simple. Chances are each editors elemnent will be taken to someone or some studio for a final mix. Things like surround are encoded in a slightly different way than what you do in Vegas. An AC3 file is not really what you would hand someone as a last stage audio element for a film print.

Bottom line with all of this is to check with your film lab, negative cutter and audio post house before you start.

An an example here is a link for FotoKems NLE > HD worlflow guideline for Avid Editors.
Preparing an Avid Media Composer, Adrenalin and Xpress-Pro project for Avid|DS Nitris Online . Now note this is *not* for a film workflow but gives you an idea about EDL's and the like.

For a pretty good overview you can also download FotoKems Student handbook.

Thing is the need to actually shoot film is kind of fading. Looking at the potential offering from RED and the actual offering from SI the day when we can shoot, edit and project a 2K image (or even print to 35mm) without it looking shabby is here now. No need for massive amounts of CPU grunt or expensive film scans. If you need a 35mm film out that is going to be your biggest 'hard' cost.
The sad news is that Vegas is perilously close to missing the boat.

Bob.

An excellent reply! Thanks also for the links.